


All That's Left

by lls_mutant



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Gen, Missing Scene, kick Bill's ass
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-02
Updated: 2010-05-02
Packaged: 2017-10-09 06:32:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/84087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lls_mutant/pseuds/lls_mutant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the mutiny, Bill Adama finally realizes there's an officer he'd better talk to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All That's Left

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [](http://falafel-musings.livejournal.com/profile)[**falafel_musings**](http://falafel-musings.livejournal.com/) for looking this over!

There was still a pile of papers on the desk. Bill wondered how it could continue to get larger, when all common sense said that paper should be an ever dwindling resource.

"Dealino is going on about Viper repairs," Saul informed him. "Seems that we're out of seals or o-rings some such thing."

"Not surprising." If they were down to something as insignificant as seals and o-rings, this was one more meeting that was almost over. "Anything else?" Saul paused, his silence heavy. Bill looked up. "What?" he asked, swirling his glass.

"It's not my place to say much of anything-"

"But you're going to say it anyway. Stop dancing around it and spit it out, Saul."

"It's Lieutenant Hoshi, sir."

"What about him?" Bill stared at the liquid at the bottom of the glass.

"What about him? Bill, do you really need me to draw you a picture here?"

"Apparently."

Saul shook his head. "The man's staring daggers at you every time your back is turned."

"Throw him in the brig for a while," Bill said. "I don't need another one of my officers trying to kill me."

Saul temporized. "It might not be the best solution, Bill. He's about the only one left who can actually work that damn tactical station, and he's the best navigator we've got. We need him."

"So?"

"Bill… it's been a week. He's not over Gaeta's death."

_Gaeta_. Bill slugged back the remainder of his drink. "I'm not his therapist, and I don't owe him a frakking apology, if that's what you're getting at."

"No, no." Saul sighed. "Just thought I'd bring it up."

"You thought wrong."

"Guess so." Saul stood. "You know," he said, as he stood by the door, "he probably wouldn't have gone along with Gaeta's mutiny. Probably didn't even see it coming, just like the rest of us. I'm guessing he's pissed as hell. In fact, I know he is. But just because someone betrays you and they have to face the consequences doesn't mean you stop loving them."

"Why don't you just hold up a sign that says _I killed Ellen_?" Bill snapped.

Saul was silent for a long minute, and Bill knew he was making an effort to control his temper. Finally, he said, "It's not just Hoshi who feels that way. I'd better get back to the CIC. I'll see myself out."

***

He dismissed the conversation from his mind easily enough, or so he thought. But the next time he went into the CIC, he couldn't help but notice Hoshi looking like a kicked puppy dog. And the anger was hardly old news- Hoshi had made that clear when they'd questioned him directly after the mutiny.

Hoshi could go frak himself.

***

He was walking through the Memorial Hall when the picture caught his eye. Zarek and Gaeta, standing side by side, smiling from an unobtrusive corner.

His first instinct was to tear it down. After all, it was only Lee that put it here- Lee had shown him the frakking picture. Some dreamy-eyed, idealistic concept of not letting anyone be forgotten. He reached out and took the picture in his hand.

On closer inspection, he noticed that Zarek had his arm around Gaeta. They looked… close. And it occurred to him that Gaeta hadn't died alone. It didn't surprise him, now that he thought about it. It made a certain amount of sense that they'd have been friends.

What surprised him was that when he realized that, he felt a bit of relief.

***

"You put the picture up," Bill accused Lee.

Lee shrugged. "I told you I was going to." But he looked away guiltily.

"What is it?"

"I wasn't going to," Lee admitted. "Not the whole thing. But when I was in the Hall, Hoshi was there, too."

"Hoshi." Was that name _ever_ going to go away? Bill was getting sick of hearing it.

"Yeah. The thing is, Dad, he was alone."

"So?"

"Dad, think about it. Everyone he was friendly with has died or been imprisoned. Everyone's avoiding him, and he did nothing wrong. I know we've all lost a lot, but most everyone at least has someone to grieve with."

Bill unscrewed a pill bottle. "That's not my problem." Lee watched him with an annoying mix of disappointment and moral superiority. "What?"

"Nothing," Lee said, shrugging. "It's just that maybe Gaeta was right."

"Frak you," Bill said, pointing to the door. "Just frakking get out."

It was a weak response, and he knew it.

***

Drinking didn't help, and no medication could heal the wounds that festered within him. He tried to sleep, but he ended up staring at the ceiling for hours on end.

A terrorist's gunshot. Radiation. A cup of poison. A suicide. A bullet from a firing squad.

Everyone made their choices. And everyone faced up to what they'd done, sooner or later.

Everyone had their reckoning.

***

He found himself in Joe's late, two nights later. Almost everyone was gone when he staggered in. Tigh glanced at him from the table where he sat with Ellen, Tory, and Chief- Galen- whoever the hell he was today- and nodded, and then gestured with his drink. Over by the bar, huddled in on himself, Hoshi was moodily moving a piece of paper around. His jacket was unbuttoned, his hair was disheveled, and he looked nothing like the calm, composed officer who worked the CIC every day.

He sat down beside Hoshi, indicated to the bartender he wanted a drink, and waited. Hoshi didn't say a word, politely pretending that he didn't exist. Sitting beside him, Bill could see the pictures were of Gaeta.

"I've never seen this one before," Bill said, taking the picture of Hoshi standing behind Gaeta, arms wrapped around him, and studying it.

"Not too many people have," Hoshi said moodily, still not looking at Bill. He took a sip of his drink. "It was taken less than a month before he left on the _Demeterius._"

"It's a good picture."

"Thanks."

He wasn't making conversation easy. Bill set the picture back down and slid over another one. As if to drive home Lee's point, it was a picture of Gaeta, Narcho, and Hoshi, all obviously drunk. "You knew Narcho, too?"

"He was a _Pegasus_ pilot," Hoshi said dully.

"Looks like he was more than that."

Hoshi scowled. "Look, Admiral, I get what you're trying to do, okay? But this isn't the first time I've had to deal with my Admiral executing someone I love for mutiny. I'm an old pro at this, all right?"

"What do you mean?" Bill asked, taken aback.

Hoshi blinked at him. "Admiral Cain shot Colonel Belzen. Maybe it wasn't mutiny, but she pretty much called it that."

"That's right." Bill slid the picture back to Hoshi, but didn't get up to move. "Did you know Colonel Belzen well?"

Hoshi made a face and traced a path of water on the bar. "He was like an older brother to me," he said. "And for that matter, Admiral Cain was something of an older sister."

"I'm sorry. I forgot."

Hoshi rubbed his face with the palm of his hands. "Yeah, well, so did everyone else."

At a loss for anything meaningful to say, Bill pulled another picture to him. Gaeta was standing in the bar, pool cue in hand, in civilian clothing and grinning. Seeing Gaeta out of military clothing almost felt like seeing him naked- in fact, Bill was pretty sure he'd seen the latter more often than the former. "He was one of the brightest I've ever had serve under me," Bill said. That much he could not deny.

Hoshi downed the rest of his drink. "He was."

At least now he could buy the man a drink. Bill gestured to the bartender, who nodded and refilled both their glasses. Hoshi picked up the glass and stared morosely at the liquid. "Too bad it tastes like shit."

"Ordinarily, I'd say it's an insult to a man to talk like that about the drink he buys you." Bill took a deep swig. "But in this case, you're right."

Hoshi finally flashed a smile at him. Short and small, but it was there, like a crack in his defenses. Bill found himself returning the smile. He looked at the picture again.

"It's why I had him work with Baltar, back when he was designing that bullshit Cylon detector," Bill continued. "Only one I had on board that had half a chance of understanding a word that came out of that crazy doctor's mouth."

"Yeah," Hoshi said, looking back at his drink, and belatedly Bill remembered that Gaeta had asked for _Baltar_ for a final confession. A sore subject, then.

"There was this one time," Bill said, and Saul _finally_ came over to join them, sitting down on the other side of Hoshi, "it was maybe two months after he'd started on _Galactica_. He was just a kid then, and he didn't often venture out of the CIC."

"I still swear he had a cot set up in there," Saul interjected. The corners of Hoshi's mouth twitched up.

"They finally got around to hazing him, and they sent him all over the _Galactica_ for signatures on some document they made up, including down to a storage bay that hadn't been used in years. And it was- what?"

"I think it was four hours before anyone realized that he hadn't made it back," Saul said, chuckling. "Which sounds bad, I know. But we went down there, and he'd started sorting through all these parts that no one had touched for _years_. By the time someone found him, he'd pretty much managed to clean up the entire bay."

They laughed, and Saul took another drink. "Gaeta wasn't one for drinking too much-" Hoshi snorted disbelief, and Saul tipped his drink- "not in front of the brass, anyway, but I played cards with him a few times. Thought he'd be an easy game."

"He counted cards," Hoshi informed him dryly.

"Yeah, well, I didn't know that then. He cleaned out Starbuck a few times, until she clocked him for doing it. Now that was a fight. Usually Starbuck fights fair, but with Gaeta…" Saul drew it out and snickered. "I thought they were going to start pulling each others' hair."

Dangerous territory again. "One thing I always wondered," Bill backpedaled, "was about that tattoo he showed in D'Anna's documentary. Never did hear the story on that."

"You didn't?" Hoshi asked, eyebrows arching. "I'm surprised. He got it with Dee." Bill inclined his head inquiringly. "They shared an apartment back on Picon the year before the attack. It worked out well, because they were never on leave at the same time, except once. I guess he was seeing someone and she was seeing someone, and they were going to actually go out all together when they walked in right at the wrong moment. So they blew them off, went out to a strip club together, and got completely smashed out of their minds. And got tattoos. She had a tiger on her hip that matched his." Hoshi turned his glass in his hands and smiled. "I was never sure I believed that story, because the idea of Dee and Felix at a strip club…"

He shook his head and Bill couldn't help laughing. "Yeah. I can't see it either."

"Would've paid money to, though," Tigh admitted.

"Yeah, me too," Hoshi said. His smile was wider now, and he shifted the pictures again. "This one," he said, pulling out the picture of himself, Narcho, and Gaeta, "this was taken not long after we got together. It's a lousy picture and I barely remember the night, but it was the first time Felix and Noel really relaxed around each other. When there's so few of us left, there's so much you need to let go…." he trailed off, smiling, and touched the picture. "Hard to believe they're both dead now."

Bill and Saul exchanged glances over Hoshi's head. There it was, right there on the table, and suddenly, Bill knew the words he'd been searching for. He put a hand on Hoshi's arm. "I'm terribly sorry for your loss, Louis."

Hoshi looked up at him, utterly surprised, and it was written all over his face that Bill was the first one to actually say the words. "Thank you, sir." He stared down at the bar. "I know that I… you…"

Bill looked at Saul. "I know you loved him," he said slowly. "And that doesn't turn off like a faucet, just because…" and he couldn't finish the sentence, because _just because he frakked us all over and turned out to be mutinous scum_ wasn't something you said to a grieving lover.

"It's just not that simple," Tigh said. "But you already know that."

Hoshi nodded and blinked rapidly, and then swallowed and stood up. "Thank you for the drink, but I… I should get some rack time in before duty. Goodnight." He gave them one last desperate look, tucked the pictures back into his jacket, and left.

Bill and Saul watched him go. "You did the right thing, Bill," Saul said. "He needed that."

"So you say."

They glanced around the bar. Kara Thrace was tinkering with the piano, Helo and a few Raptor pilots were playing a quiet game of cards at a nearby table, and to Bill's disgusted surprise, Gaius Baltar was sitting at another, alone. He was watching them, his eyes impossibly wide and looking like he was about to burst into tears.

Saul noticed it to. "Funerals aren't for the dead, Bill. They never have been. Hoshi's not the only one that needs to lay Gaeta to rest."

The words were like ripping off a barely healed scab, painful and true. He glanced at the exit just in time to see Hoshi leaving, surreptitiously wiping at his eyes. "Yeah." He finished his drink. "Guess not."


End file.
